The personal blog of Peter Lee a.k.a. "China Hand"... Life is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel, and an open book to those who read. You are welcome to contact China Matters at the address chinamatters --a-- prlee.org or follow me on twitter @chinahand.

Friday, August 17, 2012

How Do You Like the Independent’s War?

(with apologies to W.R. Hearst, who used the heading How Do You Like the Journal's War? to celebrate his paper's unrelenting advocacy of war with Spain in 1898)

As Asad AbuKhalil a.k.a. the Angry
Arab noted, The Independent’s Kim Sengupta committed the journalistic no-no of
offering a lift to FSA fighters heroically getting the hell out of Dodge as
their infiltration and uprising in a district of Aleppo collapsed.On August 10, Sengupta wrote:

… fighters without transport [were]
desperately trying to get out. We gave some of them a lift to the Sahar
district, in the outskirts, where minibuses were lined up to take people out of
Aleppo.

This represents a step across the
journalistic red-line from being a “homer” (one-sidedly supporting one’s
favored team from the sidelines or the press box) to a participant (jumping out
of the stands to give the ball a helpful kick).

Sengupta’s selective cheerleading was
also on display in the article.He was
anxious to downgrade the significance of the foreign jihadis entering Syria to
get a piece of the anti-Assad action:

An Islamist battalion which had become noted
for its unfriendliness to outsiders including fellow rebels, and had claimed
Assad’s army would be defeated quickly if only they had more fellow jihadists,
were the first to run from Salaheddine. One of their getaway vehicles, a red
pick- up truck, had been hit from the air, just as it had come out of the
district. Remains of three bodies lay at the back. A passing fighter, Hussein
Ali Motassim, gestured: “They were full of talk about their experience in Iraq
and Afghanistan; bombmaking and IDs [IEDs] but at the end, nothing.”

To pick a bone with Sengupta, it does look like the jihadis a)
were right about the battlefield limitations of FSA units, whose commanders and
fighters seem most interested in currying favor with sympathetic visiting journalists (as
opposed to those unfriendly jihadis who, in at least one incident, indicated
a strong interest in beheading two slumming infidel reporters) and b) they
sacrificed themselves in a foreign land for their cause and perhaps didn’t
really deserve having their corpses mocked by a member of the same anti-Assad team.

Badmouthing the blown-up retreating
jihadists may turn out to be a triumph of on the spot war-reporting, but it may
also mark the point when Sengupta’s enthusiasms clearly overcame his
professional and analytic detachment.

There is also a lot of reporting
suggesting that, contrary to Sengupta’s opinion, the FSA is demoralized and
bedraggled, and some foreign powers believe that it needs an injection of backbone
from hardened foreign Islamists and revolutionaries--some of whom are being thoughtfully provided
from Libya, possibly as part of a program to export its large inventory of
troublemakers to more remote and lethal jurisdictions.

For instance, Erika Solomon, reporting for Reuters from Aleppo at exactly the same time, wrote:

One of the most effective and elusive groups
in Aleppo now sending reinforcements into Damascus is called Ahrar
al-Sham, "The Free Men of Syria." Its fighters accept the bulk of
jihadist foreign fighters in Idlib and Aleppo, rebels say.

"They're
extremely effective and secretive. They coordinate with us to attack
the regime but they don't take orders from anyone. They get weapons and
explosives smuggled from abroad that are much better," said a rebel in
Aleppo called Anwar.

So we may not have seen the last of
these jihadis, despite Sengupta’s contemptuous pronouncements.

Whether or not the Independent decides
to care about Sengupta’s journalistic transgressions is another question.

My guess is No.

The Western reporting on the Middle
East this year seems even more ghastly than the gullible reporting in the
run-up to the second Iraq war.

In Egypt, even as the Muslim
Brotherhood under Morsi executes a pseudo-coup against the complaisant military
and consolidates power in execution of that canny Leninism + mass movement strategy
that terrified Western pundits a few months ago, the chinstroking conclusion is
that this is “good for democracy” or, as The Economistput it: "The sacking of a clutch of top generals is a welcome step toward securing Egypt's nascent democracy."

As for Syria, there seems to be a willful
desire, almost a compelling need, to disregard the actual dynamic.

The domestic political revolution
failed, a victim of lack of support among the upper classes in the big cities
and an overly optimistic all or nothing strategy of overthrowing Assad.The domestic military insurrection failed
with the collapse of the FSA stronghold at Babu Amr.

Today, the opposition to Assad depends
on foreign sanctions, foreign financial and material support, the assistance of
foreign jihadis, and, I suspect, the increasing participation of a variety of
non-lethal and lethal foreign special ops forces, to crush the regime and, in
the process, inflict misery on millions of its people.

And of course, there's relentless fluffing
of the insurrection by the Independent, the Guardian, al Jazeera, and a host of other Western and Gulf media outlets.

I think Helena Cobban has the right perspective on Syria: with all this foreign interest, why does the international community deny Syria the
opportunity for a managed, win-win political transition of the type that the US
and EU mediated for the apartheid regime in South Africa?

It’s probably because Israel, Saudi
Arabia, and the Gulf regimes are understandably nervous about the emergence of
populist regimes across the Middle East, new outfits that bypass or eliminate
the traditional elites that were so sedulous in maintaining good relations with
Israel and the Gulf autocrats.

Instead of being reactive, these
conservative regimes have decided to be proactive, and submerge domestic and regional
dissatisfaction with an aggressive program against external enemies.They are fortunate in that they have four
shared targets-- Syria, the Hizbullah political and military force in Lebanon,
the Shi’ite regime in Iraq, and Iran—whose well-being the United States has
virtually no interest in sustaining.

Syria is the first opponent to get
pitched into the meatgrinder, thanks to the vulnerabilities presented by its stark political and social divisions.

The next
Shi’ite target will probably not be Iran, a rather cohesive and prosperous petrostate
with strong Russian and Chinese backing.

Next up, I expect, will be Hizbullah
in Lebanon (with an enthusiastic assist from Israel) and the shaky
Shi’ite-dominated Maliki regime in Iraq.

Iraq is experiencing a Summer of Blood,
not an Arab Spring, as busy Sunni militants do double duty, sticking it Iraqi
government targets as well as the Assad regime.

What’s really going on in the region,
in other words, is not simply a Syrian insurrection against tyranny; it’s part
of a conservative Sunni counter-revolution, abetted by Israel, compensating for
the political and demographic weakness of wealthy and powerful but unpopular
regimes by co-opting and accelerating the revolutions in antagonistic
neighboring states.

Just to be even-handed here, I include
Russia and China on the list of callous meddlers.I think they’ve made the decision that, since
reconciliation and modified regime survival are off the table in Syria, it’s
preferable to have a catastrophic regime collapse instead of a regime change
that puts a pro-Gulf group firmly in charge of a functioning Syrian state
ready to do mischief against Iraq, Hizbullah, and Iran.

But in the Western press, all we get
is mindless cheerleading for Syrian rebellion, instead of a grim
acknowledgement that foreign intransigence has foreclosed the possibility of a
political solution between Assad and his outgunned opponents and instead led to
a bloody civil war that has killed tens of thousands, led to the destruction of
large swaths of Syria’s major cities, and the creation of 2 million internally
displaced persons.

Was there a better way for the
“international community” to respond to the political crisis in Syria?

I don’t think the “international
community” is interested in asking that question, let alone answering it.

But I think that the West’s selective
enthusiasm for “revolution”—violent regime change imposed on a hostile nation
in which the West has limited opportunities for beneficial leverage, or even
directing the activities of its sometime allies and equivocal proxies--obscures a potentially much more
realistic and positive agenda: promoting political and social evolution among US
allies.

Instead of managing a flailing
insurrection at a distance in a Syria, the United States and the other external
powers could promote incremental political, legal, and social progress much more effectively, and
achieve a lot more good, in the political and judicial systems of allies Saudi
Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain, and Jordan.

That would make sense, of course, if
they really cared about what happened to the people in the region.

Even Turkey, that suit-and-tie free
market democracy and wannabe Europlayer that is a beacon of progress compared
to the Arab autocracies, could benefit from some more US best-practices
armtwisting.

Turkey is recognized as “the world’s
foremost jailer of journalists” and not just in connection with reporting on
the government’s bloody work in repressing Kurdish separatism.Journalists are caught up in Erdogan’s dirty
war with disgruntled elements in the nation’s armed forces as well.

Although the government alleges that several
journalists are in jail, whether as a convict or a defendant, “because they are
bank robbers and rapists”, the identities of such criminals are not revealed,
even at the requests referring Turkey’s Freedom of Information Act.

The rest of the people, which seems like the whole lot of journalists behind
the bars, are doubtlessly jailed because of their journalistic work, as the
evidence is clear:

Their homes and offices are being searched, their public writings are being
seized as “criminal documents”, their unpublished books are being banned by
prosecutors, they are being questioned about why they published a certain news
story and the indictments against them list their news items or published
commentary as the only “smoking gun.”

The pro-government media in Turkey, on the other hand, amplifies the human
rights violations of the political authorities, worsening the personal
tragedies of objective journalists or their dissident counterparts.

Character assassination becomes the norm. For instance, wiretapped
conversations, which have generally nothing to do with the legal case, are
being published or broadcasted in violation of the privacy of the defendant.

Cold facts and flat statistics cannot properly describe the tragedy of the
Turkish journalist as a human being, though:

Take IPI World Press Freedom Hero Nedim Sener, who was kept in jail for over a
year in spite of the huge international outcry over his arrest, as well as his
colleague Ahmet Sik, an equally respected investigative journalist.

When we visited Sener in Silivri Prison on November 2011 with another
delegation of IPI’s National Committee, he had told us how his 8-year-old
daughter offered to be jailed with him. “If they have biscuits, it would be
enough for me”, she had explained to him.

Later, when he was released on March 2012, the same Sener would be crying on
live TV when revealing how her daughter was strip searched at the entrance of
the prison, because three metal buttons of her skirt had alerted the detectors.

Spencer Ackerman might use the Pussy Riot trial as a masturbation aid for his fantasies of punk revolution in Russia; but the systematic suppression and degradation of Turkish journalists typified by the ordeal of Sener and his daughter seem to me to be more moving and significant--and worthy of redress.

It’s not all beer and skittles for
minorities in Turkey, either, as Kizilkaya wrote on his personal blog on August
1:

As a point of information, the Alevis
of Turkey are a different sect from the Allawites of Syria, though the two are
sometimes incorrectly confounded.

Even Qatar, home of Al Jazeera and home
to 250,000 prosperous indigenes who rely on the labor of 1.5 million (visa’d
and politically nonexistent) guest workers in what is in effect the world’s
largest gated community, and therefore an oasis of stability in the Middle
East, could conceivably benefit from some US attention.

Qatar, in addition to serving as a key
paymaster for the Syrian insurrection, is the obesity capital of the
world.

Qatar named as the
fattest nation on earth where HALF of all adults are obese

That’s about double the US rate.

America’s CENTCOM, whose “forward
headquarters” resides in Qatar’s Al Udeid air base, could perhaps provide a
signal service by deploying its forces to encourage exercise, reduced
consumption of fatty foods, and less smoking by flabby Qataris to protect them
from a threat much more immediate than an Iranian attack: diabetes.

17% of all Qataris already suffer from
diabetes, to the dismay of the government. Again, that's double the US rate.

My proposal is tongue in cheek of
course but long after the bloody shambles of Syria is over, tens of thousands well-to-do
Qataris will be mourning the loss of their limbs, vision, and/or overall health
to the scourge of diabetes.

And, of course, hundreds of thousands
of Syrians of every class will be mourning the loss of their loved ones,
health, livelihoods, and futures to the protracted insurrection and the
political posturing that sustained it.

Maybe it’s time for a different
perspective on the Middle East and the struggles that matter--and the ends to which the United States can bring its still-considerable power and influence to bear.

7 comments:

*** An Islamist battalion which had become noted for its unfriendliness to outsiders including fellow rebels, and had claimed Assad’s army would be defeated quickly if only they had more fellow jihadists, were the first to run from Salaheddine. One of their getaway vehicles, a red pick- up truck, had been hit from the air, just as it had come out of the district. Remains of three bodies lay at the back. A passing fighter, Hussein Ali Motassim, gestured: “They were full of talk about their experience in Iraq and Afghanistan; bombmaking and IDs [IEDs] but at the end, nothing.”

To pick a bone with Sengupta, it does look like the jihadis a) were right about the battlefield limitations of FSA units, whose commanders and fighters seem most interested in currying favor with sympathetic visiting journalists (as opposed to those unfriendly jihadis who, in at least one incident, indicated a strong interest in beheading two slumming infidel reporters) and b) they sacrificed themselves in a foreign land for their cause and perhaps didn’t really deserve having their corpses mocked by a member of the same anti-Assad team.

Badmouthing the blown-up retreating jihadists may turn out to be a triumph of on the spot war-reporting, but it may also mark the point when Sengupta’s enthusiasms clearly overcame his professional and analytic detachment. ***

*** Badmouthing the blown-up retreating jihadists may turn out to be a triumph of on the spot war-reporting, but it may also mark the point when Sengupta’s enthusiasms clearly overcame his professional and analytic detachment. ***

He is just reporting what he sees. If anything it proves his objectivity and that he is not a rebel apologist. As to giving a lift, he was in a rebel car. It's the rebels who gave other rebels a lift.

Man, it's since years that I haven't read such an absurd nonsense. No wonder that it appears on a blog that calls itself China Matters

Dear Senor or Senora Nobody,Thanks for reading, and commenting on the post so soon after it went up.I am intrigued by the near instantaneous appearance of your manifestation of trembling outrage on my unknown blog (accompanied, I might observe by a certain shakiness in the copy-and-paste department). Please, do share your insights into the use of the possessive pronoun in the press room, particularly on the use of "we gave a ride" to exclude the journalist-observer. Thanks!

*** I am intrigued by the near instantaneous appearance of your manifestation of trembling outrage on my unknown blog ***

What's there to be intrigued by? I am sure Abu Khalil has told you already that it's all conspiracies. You know, the Hasbara department and the stuff? Ya Allah, the previous generation of the Angry Arab's readership was dumb, but the new one seems to be simply unteachable

But I will give you this. I was googling for news about Syria and I was googling by the names of reporters I knew were in Aleppo. And you came up when I was checking Sengupta. That's all.

Normally I don't belong to the category of people who claim that they don't suffer fools gladly. I actually do. I don't mind people lacking in common sense or intelligence. But you are an extreme case. So I responded.

Now let me unfollow your blog post and we end our exchange here. I am familiar with the Angry Arab blog and the kind of readers it attracts. I am not even sure why I have even started it besides the fact that I was impressed by the nonsense you are posting here